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Shift by Jennifer Bradbury
By Allie Costa
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Sometimes, life takes a detour.
Shortly after graduating from high school, Chris and his best friend Win set out on their bicycles, determined to travel across the country before college. Like all good road trip, this trek is bumpy, memorable, and metaphoric. Towards the end of their journey, Win unexpectedly takes off by himself. Feeling abandoned and upset, Chris finishes the trip alone. When Chris comes home without Win, he has to answer to his parents, Win's parents, and the police. Where did his best friend go? Why? What really happened between Point A and B?
As close as he thought they were after ten years of friendship, Chris found himself surprised by some of the things his best friend did during their trip. He learns even more as he unravels the mystery of Win's disappearance. In the summertime sequences, their dialogue is always comfortable, sometimes teasing, sometimes competitive. They are friends who almost act like brothers, but they aren't one in the same. Chris comes from a working class family while Win, whose parents are well-off, obviously has difficulty getting along with his father. Growing up, the boys didn't really think about going their separate ways, but now that they have, Chris must figure out what his friend wanted and what he must do.
My favorite line from the book reads as follows:
“Reality had a disappointing habit of not measuring up to my memories.” I also really enjoyed Chris' assessment of his situation:
“[E]veryone kept telling me how much fun I was going to have in college, how much freedom I'd have. I was starting to believe that I'd used up my lifetime quota of both on the trip this summer.”
Readers will easily navigate through this story. Like a good film noir, Shift unfolds using both the past and the present: the chapters alternate between the here-and-now, with Chris starting his freshman year of college, and the summer, as Chris and Win make their way across the country. Their friendship and the investigation are accompanied by bicycles, patches, jackets, one glove, small towns, campgrounds, diners, and postcards. Though the element of mystery is always there, Shift is not a whodunit. Instead, it asks: Why did Win leave? Who is he, really? How well do we really know anyone?
Everything Beautiful in the World by Lisa Levchuk
By Allie Costa
If you combined the family strain and personal search from The Pursuit of Happiness by Tara Altebrando with the forbidden teacher-student relationship from Teach Me by R.A. Nelson and added a pinch of the melancholy from Lisa, Bright and Dark, by Neufeld, you would get Everything Beautiful in the World, a stunning debut from Lisa Levchuk.
Set in New Jersey in 1980, the story is that of seventeen-year-old Edna, an only child whose mother has recently been diagnosed with cancer and hospitalized in New York City. Edna can't (or won't) visit her mother, with whom she fou-ght shortly before the diagnosis was revealed. She can't get that unfinished fight out of her head and feels guilty, as though her words caused the illness. As Edna pulls away from her father, she falls for her sculpture teacher, a married man in his early thirties who "sees beauty in things that other people take for granted," including her. Edna keeps their developing relationship a secret as she continues her day-to-day routine, attending school and working at a pharmacy where she occasionally steals objects and works for a middle-aged man who thinks he looks like Elvis Presley.
Though Edna is initially consumed by her relationship with Mr. Howland, the story becomes more layered as time goes on, especially with revelations related to her family's past. Her parents insist that she begin seeing a therapist, so she does, but she still can't manage to visit her mother. In one memorable scene, she and her father set out for the hospital, but Edna gets physically ill to the point that they must make multiple stops, then ultimately turn around and head home.
Told in vignettes tit-led after the locations or goings-on ("Another Night at the Pharmacy," "A Party at Patty's House"), with realistic references to the time period (the music of Bruce Springsteen, the aftermath of the Vietnam War), this coming-of-age story will appeal to fans of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson as well as those who lived through the actual era and/or read young adult fiction written in the eighties.